ALBUM REVIEW: A Kingdom Built Upon The Wreckage Of Heaven – Outergods

All-you-can-eat pizza, fantasy football teams, and showering at festivals. Some things just sound better on paper than they do in reality. With their debut album A Kingdom Built Upon The Wreckage Of Heaven, you can add Nottingham’s extreme metal supergroup OUTERGODS to that list. 

The brainchild of LOST OUTRIDERS’ Nathe Sinfield, featuring members of ANTRE, EVIL SCARECROW and RAISED BY OWLS, OUTERGODS are a love letter to old-school death metal, made modern with a chaotic mix of deathgrind and melodeath. If the idea has you frothing at the mouth for more, you shouldn’t hold your breath. Opener Nocturnal Death is soaked in old-school atmospherics, before drummer Jordan Spencer takes a police baton to your brain, unleashing a cacophony of unhinged rhythms. Alongside vocalist Sam Strachan’s shrieking poetics, you’re left feeling catatonic less than two minutes in.

Into The Howling Void isn’t much better; buzzsaw guitars cut through your eardrums like they’re shouting timber in the Amazon rainforest, as the drums bludgeon and bulldoze their way through. If it wasn’t for the snarling dual vocal interplay within the chorus, and a sickly melodic groove that cuts through the grind, you’d be feeding these lumberjacks meat-and-potatoes death metal.

It’s near the halfway mark that A Kingdom Built Upon The Wreckage Of Heaven shows it can bite as well as it barks. Tangled In The Cogs Of The Nightmare Machine sounds like a different band; gushing winds grow into the beats of a marching army, a melody so groovy it might as well become an honorary member of MACHINE HEAD, and a lyrical lament so poetic, you’re left contemplating your existence in society’s endless machine — “We are nothing but slaves inside a system where we’re all so easily replaced / Nothing but drones, we’re caught in the cogs / Our hands trapped as we choke on the toxic smog.”

Before A Kingdom Built Upon The Wreckage Of Heaven, OUTERGODS had just a single song out in the world. And their jump to full-length debut, without a stepping stone EP to iron out their sound, leaves them suffering with bloat. Cut off the fat of the opening trio and deadwood instrumental Abandoned At The Centre Of A Celestial Hell (which sounds more like a PlayStation springing to life), and you’re left with nothing but prime cuts. What might be a mediocre debut album, could’ve been a masterful EP.

Nothing But A Fetid Worm is a two-minute tornado; storms of screams collide with tsunami-sized melodies, as deliriously destructive death-grind drumming drills tinnitus into your ears. Flesh Prison festers in tech-death purgatory, blegh-ing its way into life, capturing the anger and anguish solitude breeds as Strachan shrieks “an unpickable lock in an impenetrable fortress of misery, a life sentence of endless purgatory“. And the titular closer is a towering, seven-minute monolith that rips up their formula, opting for doom-drenched sludge metal before bringing their old-school death metal home, unleashing repetitive verses and choruses that are infectious, making a song that shouldn’t be catchy, incessantly catchy. 

Whilst OUTERGODS sounds better on paper, A Kingdom Built Upon The Wreckage Of Heaven bears enough meat on its bones to suggest there’s potential for this band to grow into themselves and iron out their sound. 

Rating: 7/10

A Kingdom Built Upon The Wreckage Of Heaven is set for release on September 1st via Prosthetic Records.

Like OUTERGODS on Facebook.